themorningafter

The Morning After: Everything Samsung revealed at Galaxy Unpacked 2024

The Morning After: Everything Samsung revealed at Galaxy Unpacked 2024

There weren’t too many surprises (thanks, leaks!) at Samsung’s , held live in Paris with satellite events in New York, London and elsewhere. The big announcement was Samsung’s foray into a new kind of wearable, the smart ring.Samsung claims it’s been able to cram its existing sensor tech into the smaller form factor. Made of titanium, it packs in an accelerometer and PPG sensors to measure blood flow and detect skin temperature. It can track metrics such as sleep score, movement during your slumber, heart rate, respiratory rate and menstrual cycles. Notably, there’s no subscription required to tap into all…
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The Morning After: US officials help take down AI-powered Russian bot farm with nearly 1,000 fake X accounts

The Morning After: US officials help take down AI-powered Russian bot farm with nearly 1,000 fake X accounts

US officials and their allies have identified and taken down an artificial intelligence-powered Russian bot farm comprising almost 1,000 accounts. These accounts were able to spread disinformation and pro-Russian sentiments across X, formerly Twitter. The Justice Department has revealed the scheme was made possible by software created by a digital media department in RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet.According to a cybersecurity advisory from the FBI, intelligence officers from the Netherlands, and cybersecurity authorities from Canada, it centered on a tool called Meliorator, which can create “authentic appearing social media personas en masse,” generate text messages as well as images…
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The Morning After: NASA’s year-long Mars simulation volunteers return to the real world

The Morning After: NASA’s year-long Mars simulation volunteers return to the real world

NASA’s Mission 1 crew — all volunteers — have left their 1700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center. Since last June 25, they’ve conducted a fair few simulated Mars walks, grown vegetables and performed other tasks designed to support life and work in that environment. They also faced (a simulation of) the stressors actual space travelers to Mars could experience, like 22-minute communication delays with Earth.After 378 days in a mock Mars habitat, the four volunteers for NASA’s yearlong simulation of a stay on the red planet are coming home. The crew — Kelly Haston, Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and…
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The Morning After: OpenAI’s week of security issues

The Morning After: OpenAI’s week of security issues

Perhaps unsurprisingly, July 4th was a quiet day for news, but we’ve still got editorials on e-ink writing, the most-delayed video game ever and more bad news from the makers of ChatGPT.Earlier this week, engineer and Swift developer Pedro José Pereira Vieito dug into OpenAI's Mac ChatGPT app and found that it was storing user conversations locally in plain text, rather than encrypting them. Because that app is only available from OpenAI's website, and since it's not available on the App Store, it doesn't have to follow Apple's sandboxing requirements. OpenAI released an update that added encryption to locally stored…
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The Morning After: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Fold 6 leak early

The Morning After: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Fold 6 leak early

We already told you what to expect, but if you demand more proof, the leakers will oblige. This time, @evleaks on X released copies of product pages (and images) for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6.The main spec changes are for the flip. Previous Galaxy Z Flip models only had 12-megapixel rear cameras, so the Flip 6's purported 50-megapixel wide camera (paired with a 12-megapixel ultrawide) is a huge upgrade. If the leak is accurate, it'll also have a bigger battery.According to the product pages, Samsung didn't give the Galaxy Z Fold 6 many substantial upgrades,…
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The Morning After: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50 percent in five years due to AI

The Morning After: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50 percent in five years due to AI

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years, due to data centers required to power artificial intelligence, according to the company’s 2024 Environmental Report. The report shows the company’s progress towards meeting its self-proclaimed objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2030 – despite this additional challenge.Using AI features (let alone training the models) uses a lot of energy. In 2023, researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University found that generating a single image using artificial intelligence can use as much energy as charging a smartphone.Google has a lot of AI projects…
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The Morning After: Supreme Court rejects rulings on social media moderation

The Morning After: Supreme Court rejects rulings on social media moderation

Two state laws from Texas and Florida, that could upend the way social media companies handle content moderation are still up in the air. The Supreme Court sent the challenges back to lower courts, which vacates previous rulings. In a 9 - 0 decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the Supreme Court said that earlier rulings in lower courts had not properly evaluated the laws’ impact on the First Amendment. Never heard of NetChoice? It’s an industry group representing Meta, Google, X and other large tech companies. So it’s incredibly well-funded. NetChoice argued that the laws were…
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The Morning After: The US Treasury finalizes tax rules for crypto

The Morning After: The US Treasury finalizes tax rules for crypto

Welcome to the first day of July. Summer is here in earnest, but let me keep you, briefly, indoors with tales of finalized rules for crypto in the US, and how Lego is making bricks from stardust.A new rule finalized by the US Treasury Department will ensure that people that dipped their toes into crypto (and crypto trading) are paying the proper amount on their sales. The new rule will require cryptocurrency platforms like exchanges and payment processors to report their users' transactions to the IRS. Brokers will have to start reporting sales proceeds on digital assets in 2026 for…
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The Morning After: What to expect at Samsung’s Unpacked 2024 event

The Morning After: What to expect at Samsung’s Unpacked 2024 event

Samsung's latest Unpacked event will kick off on July 10th. The company has already released its latest flagship phones this year, unveiling the S24 family. But now it’s time for its spinoff smartphones: the foldables. That and the long-teased Galaxy Ring. The tiny wearable is slated to arrive “in or around August,” so it would be more of a surprise if the device didn’t appear at Unpacked. The ring will measure heart rate, movement and breathing to help track your sleep.I’m expecting the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 to appear, although with minor tweaks that might…
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The Morning After: Microsoft might be the latest company to violate antitrust laws

The Morning After: Microsoft might be the latest company to violate antitrust laws

Nearly a year after the European Commission opened its investigation into Microsoft, the European Union’s executive body’s preliminary findings say the company violated antitrust laws by tying Microsoft Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 business suites. (Microsoft pulled Teams for users in the EU back in October.)This all kicked off in 2020 when Slack — rival work chat software similar to Teams — filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, claiming it broke the EU’s competition rules in bundling Teams.The European Commission said Microsoft “may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or…
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